I do not think anything serious should be done after dinner, as nothing should be before breakfast.

The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth.

Alcoholic drinks, rightly used, are good for body and soul alike, but as a restorative of both there is nothing like brandy.

Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.

The hardest thing to attain... is the appreciation of difference without insisting on superiority.

It is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handsomest, and in every way best races of all times.

When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.

When [wines] were good they pleased my sense, cheered my spirits, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same benefits on other people. (Notes on a Cellar Book)

But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.

But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.

Focus isn't about hammering one nail all our lives.It’s about hammering lots of nails, one way, all our lives.

But he just stared at my eyes, as if searching for a stray eyelash. A free wish.

You wasted $150,000 on an education you could have got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.

I think as any artist you always want to grow; you always want to get better.

I'm nostalgic and I do think about a "what if."

I can get a firestorm going anywhere in the United States by saying 'O.J.'

It is impossible to give a soldier a good education without making him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him.

We were by nature children of wrath, even as others.